


Laundry Day

by Krahka



Category: Star Wars: The Old Republic
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-27
Updated: 2014-03-27
Packaged: 2018-01-17 05:47:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1376125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Krahka/pseuds/Krahka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Jedi Consular does his laundry. Or not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Laundry Day

Qyzen had given the mammals on the ship an ultimatum.

"Your scent is great evil. Makes it hard to track prey. It comes from your clothes. Make it go away."

It hadn’t exactly occurred to Talward that he hadn’t washed his clothes since the Republic Health Administration forced him to get them sterilized after he left Taris. It was easier to just wear the same few robes every day and worry about bigger things, like the Jedi Order at stake. It hadn’t occurred to him either that Tharan Cedrax hadn’t washed his clothes since they got off Tatooine.

"When you’re busy doing groundbreaking science, it’s easy to forget mundane matters." Tharan had said. "The Jedi should do it. I’m sure he could take an hour out of his dreadfully important sitting around and contemplating the oneness of the galaxy and wash his robes."

"And I’m sure that calling up all your ex-girlfriends, begging them to take you back will get your Vandryk Generator done sooner," Talward retorted. "Can’t we make the droid do it?"

C2-N2 interjected. “I am programmed to perform a variety of domestic tasks including nutritional information, window cleaning, dusting …”

"Yes," Talward said. "But can you do laundry?"

"I’m afraid I am not programmed with laundry protocols! For 5000 credits, you may purchase the laundry module for the highest quality laundering …"

"Do we have that many credits?" Talward asked. He was about as good at keeping track of his accounts as he was at keeping track of his laundry.

"Give me an hour on Nar Shaddaa and I’ll make ten times those credits, assuming we can find one that’s worth going to that hasn’t banned me from going there for some trumped up reason. Maybe I could teach you my card counting techniques … assuming they let Jedi in, considering their obvious advantage at the card table … If it’s in Republic space, you could make an argument that they’re discriminating against you as a Miraluka."

"No, I am not gambling away all our money to buy a laundry module. Fine. I’ll just do it myself."

"Doesn’t matter how it gets done," Qyzen said to all this as he went back to his room. "Make the scent gone. It repels prey."

Which is how Talward somehow got saddled with laundry duty. He shouldn’t’ve agreed to it, but he didn’t feel like arguing with Tharan. Maybe he could get out of it because he was weakened from healing the Masters. He was strong enough to keep fighting, but fighting a rancor seemed like an easier prospect than going through all this laundry.

He went through his room to find the pile where he put all of his robes. He kept his space clean and free of clutter, so they were all in the closet, where he put everything he didn’t want to deal with. He had a system already going. He threw a robe into the pile, and he’d pull a robe out. Or he’d just sleep in his robes, if they were comfortable and lightweight enough. Tharan had told him that the disheveled look was “the only thing he had going for him.”

Maybe he should gather his strength first. Tharan would yell at him if he caught him meditating, but making a sandwich? Food was a priority for all living things, to be living at all, and Talward couldn’t photosynthesize, no matter how hard he sat in the sun and tried. He once tried living off nothing but the Force but then his masters staged an intervention telling him that even Jedi need to eat. So he was making a sandwich.

It occurred to him that this was a procrastination measure, to avoid doing the laundry. He wasn’t even hungry. He already had lunch about ten minutes ago, but here he was, having lunch again. Maybe he’d save it for later? Maybe he’d make some more sandwiches, so that he wouldn’t have to make any for later and he could pack them in his bags and always have something to eat while away from the ship, or when C2-N2 decided to mix Alderaanian nectar into all of their meals for some unexplained and unexplainable reason.

He finished making the sandwich and took a bite of it. He was right. He wasn’t hungry. He wrapped it back up in foil and put it in the refrigerator and wondered what else there was that needed to be done besides the laundry.

Alphabetizing. He needed to alphabetize his book collection. Most of his books were on his datapad, which automatically alphabetized it. But he needed to further categorize them by genre, author, subject matter, year written, that would all make it much easier to browse. He went back into his room and started browsing through his datapad. His multiple datapds. He’d have to consolidate everything. That was yet another thing to do.

He sat next to the pile of laundry. He’d get it done. After he was finished with this task, and to properly categorize all his books, he needed to read them. Carefully. To come up with any sort of rigorous categorization system. He started with aurek. “Aeons of Light and Darkness,” that was a good one. Or would “A Better Paradigm For Structural Seismic Excavation“ be the first? Would it could if it was just “A”? Maybe go in the other direction and start with thesh? “Thul Etymology and Dialectical Variances.” He hadn’t read that one yet. He was on Alderaan. That might come in handy.

He was getting closer to doing the laundry, because he was sitting on the pile of laundry.

He flipped through the book for a while before wondering if Tharan was any closer to getting his laundry in a pile. Talward already did all the hard work beforehand. He already had his clothes in a pile before Qyzen even had to ask him to do it.

He went downstairs to see whether Tharan had at least got all his dirty clothes together so that Talward could pick them up and put them in the ship’s laundry machine.

Talward couldn’t figure out what he was even doing. But it didn’t look all that productive. It seemed to be a card game of some kind, but he wasn’t playing against anyone he could see, and he was deeply engrossed in it. 

“Tharan! Have you …”

“Jedi! Could you at least knock?”

“Well there’s no door to knock on …”

“That’s another thing we need on this ship. Doors. Doors and a decent bar.”

“Doors are meaningless distractions when you can see through walls. And floors. I can see everything you’re doing no matter what’s physically in between us.”

“Thanks Jedi, did you just come here to make sure that I never sleep again?”

“I was wondering if you had got your laundry together so that I could well, launder it.”

Tharan heaved a deep sigh, as if he was being asked to pick up a bantha and toss it twelve kilometers. “You’re the one with telekinesis. Can’t you just pick them up with your mind or something? Or is that a breach of some Jedi code about using your powers for something useful?”

“I … I suppose I could do that, but it’s not like it doesn’t take up any exertion to use it.”

“If I wasn’t so busy I could test that,” Tharan said, as the screen lit up in bright colors and he restarted the card game all over again.

Talward sighed and started picking up clothes that were strewn about the floor. When he bent over to pick them up with his hands, instead of with the Force, Tharan snorted and went back to his card game.

Once they were all in the hamper, he picked it up, his small frame looking even smaller under the massive hamper, and put it out in the hallway. Qyzen was right. It did have a peculiar odor to it, all together like this. It must’ve been Tharan’s chemicals.

That was half of the job. He was halfway there. He decided to reward himself by going back to reading. He went back to his room to go get his datapad when he realized that his room needed cleaning. It needed to be cleaned right now or he wouldn’t be able to meditate in it. He wasn’t going to meditate in it right now, he had laundry to do, but he needed to clean the place if he wanted to meditate in it later. It hadn’t bothered him before, but right now it was nagging at his mind.

He started with the things that would get bad. Those boxes of takeout Tionese wouldn’t clean themselves. They’d just fester and start to smell, which would break his concentration and also smell bad. And the parts from the new focus he was making that he never finished because he found a new, better one. He should probably put those away so that he could use those parts for something else. 

Or maybe he could finish it and give it to some other Jedi who wanted a Force focus. He couldn’t think of exactly whom he would give it to, but maybe they’d appreciate it more. At least they’d appreciate the gesture. Maybe he’d give it to Tharan just to annoy him. Maybe he’d learn something else about making Force focuses by making another one. Maybe by making a large number of them and then taking them apart and putting them back together again.

He spent about an hour at this before getting bored. He had to do the laundry. He had to clean his room. He had to alphabetize his book collection.

Qyzen came by. He didn’t have to knock because there were no doors on the ship.

“Herald. Have you cleaned your clothing yet?”

Talward looked down at his feet and focused on them very closely. There was sand in his boots. Tatooine would never leave him. 

“No, I’m afraid that I’m still working on that.”

“Do you need any help?” Qyzen asked.

“I … no, no thank you Qyzen, you’ve already done enough for me already.”

Qyzen looked at Talward carefully with his one good eye and shrugged. “As it is.” With that he left. 

The laundry was still in a pile. He was still halfway done. Halfway more, if getting Tharan’s laundry counted. So that was the whole way there. No, wait, that wasn’t right. So he was more like three quarters of the way there? This was Master Xeno’s Paradox, of the blaster bolt that always had to approach halfway from where it was to where it was going, and always halfway to that, and always halfway to that, always in a single place and between another single place until motion became impossible. It was an asymptotic quest. It would always approach done, but never truly be done. 

No! He would not allow that to happen! The paradox may have flummoxed the ancient masters but it had been resolved through modern mathematics! He had to move ever forward, even if it meant being stationary in an infinite series of places and never reaching his target!

Talward stood up with renewed vigor. He marched over to the pile of laundry he had in the closet and threw it in the air with the Force. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the skill to pick up several separate pieces of things and control them all individually, so they went flying everywhere. Now his room was a mess again! And he hadn’t even completely finished cleaning it the first time!

But anything was possible through the Force, all it took was practice. He wasn’t going to leave here until he found a way to lift them all at once and put them back in the hamper. He tried focusing on the pile as one, and on the universe as one, and got distracted by the universe for a while instead of the clothes. He went back to thinking about the pile. He lifted it up again, and while he had a bit more control over it, a few articles still dropped to the ground. That would not do. 

He tipped the hamper over again to try the whole thing again. Focusing on the pile as one seemed to work. Focusing on the entire universe seemed to not work. So he needed to focus on the pile as a bigger one. But a smaller one than the universe. He wondered if he could propel the entire ship through space through the Force. He tried but couldn’t tell if it was the Force propelling it or just the mundane force propelling it.

After a few more tries of this, he finally got the hang of picking up multiple objects and placing them in a container. Despite himself, he felt very accomplished. Accomplished enough that he almost forgot that this accomplishment was supposed to accomplish a completely different accomplishment and he was just getting distracted from the task he was supposed to accomplish in the first place.

Upon realizing this, he resolved for the fifth time since Qyzen asked him to do the laundry to stop procrastinating and get it done in a timely manner. He had it all in a hamper, both his and Tharan’s, and he was able to do it with the Force, so he was halfway there. Again. Still halfway there, just like he was an hour ago. But this time he was more like three quarters of the way there. All he had to do was throw this all into the laundry machine and … 

It occurred to him that he never actually did laundry before. They always had droids do it in the Jedi Temple. It couldn’t be that hard, could it? You just threw in the clothes, threw in the soap and waited for it to be clean, right? If a droid could do it, so could he! Except not his droid. Perhaps Tharan’s idea to gamble away their budget and buy the laundry module wasn’t such a bad idea for next time? But if this went well they could save money just by doing it themselves, and wasn’t frugality a virtue? At the very least it would allow them to allocate more of their budget to important things, like archaeology and charity and whatever it was that Tharan was doing with that generator that was supposed to change the galaxy.

Talward tried to pick up the hamper with his arms, but struggled to keep on his feet, since it appeared to weigh more than he did. He decided that after all that work with the individual pieces of laundry all together, just picking up the hamper with the Force would be the simplest way to proceed. He lifted it up and carried it in front of him to the ship’s laundry room. Out of lack of use, it had mostly been converted into another cargo hold, and the laundry machines were covered in labeled bags containing the various detritus that he found while out on digs. Most of them were just rocks, even to his trained eye. But his trained eye knew the importance of rocks, and he was hesitant to move them. They could go on the floor and go back to their places after the laundry was done. He thought of investing in more shelf space for them.

He examined the buttons and knobs on the laundry machine and dryer. Their workings were as arcane to him as the secrets of the Force were to the uninitiated. Apparently there were different heats to the water? And delicate washing? Well, these clothes hadn’t been washed in a long time, he thought, so he couldn’t put it on the delicate cycle. He couldn’t afford to be delicate with such a stench! He decided to leave the temperature setting as it was, since he was a little afraid of tampering with it.

The ship had come with a bottle of detergent. Talward did know that detergent was an important part of the laundering process. There were some instructions on the back, as well as a list of ingredients, but he decided that the best idea would be to let the Force guide him as he did this task. That’d save him time on reading instructions, and with the Force he could do anything, right? Including laundry!

He poured the clothing into the laundry machine, poured in what seemed to be a reasonable amount of detergent, closed the door and pushed the “on” button. The machine whirred to life and made a satisfying gurgling noise. He assumed that meant that it was working. With that, he left it to soak until it was done.

He went back to alphabetizing and sorting his data collection while it went to work. He worked happily on this until he was interrupted by Tharan yelling at him.

“What did you do this time, Jedi?” he accused.

“Hm?” Talward looked up from his datapad. It smelled strongly of soap.

“How much detergent did you put in that machine?”

“As much as the Force guided me to put in there,” Talward replied. Saying it out loud, it did sound stupid.

Tharan facepalmed, having nothing to say to this.

Talward sighed and got up. “All right, I’ll try to mop it up.”

Tharan went with him down to the laundry room. “I’ll help if you’re so incompetent that you can’t do anything without the Force guiding you instead of say, reading the directions like a normal sentient.”

The room was a mess of bubbles and water. Tharan grabbed the mop near the door as Talward rushed over to turn off the laundry machine, being careful not to slip on the soapy floor.

“How did you even do this?” Tharan asked. “Don’t they teach you basic life skills in the Jedi, or are they too busy teaching you to become one with the Force to teach you how to wash your own clothes?”

“I’m afraid that was lacking in my curriculum,” Talward said as he held the door to the washing machine closed to keep more soapy water from leaking out.

“That explains so much you don’t even know,” Tharan said as he began to mop.

With the washing machine turned off, the tide of soap subsided. Both men gave a sigh of relief.

“All right,” Tharan said. “Since I have to hold your hand through everything, the next thing you do after completely covering everything in the room with soap is put it in the dryer. The dryer is the other machine. It dries your clothes. But not everything else.” There was a distinct sarcastic edge to his voice.

Talward chose to ignore the sassing and take this as a learning experience. “Right. So I just take them out and put them in the dryer?”

“Right. And then … you know what? Just put the clothes in and let me put on the settings so that we don’t have a fire on top of all this.”

Talward let him take control. A Jedi was supposed to be humble and know when he didn’t know something as well as someone else, right? At the very least, a Jedi was not supposed to set his clothes on fire.

After all the clothes were in the dryer and the dryer set to dry, the two men looked back and forth at each other, and at the mess that had already been made.

“We’re getting the laundry module to make the droid do it next time,” Tharan said, surveying the damage. Talward nodded in agreement.

The two of them decided to stay in the laundry room to make sure nothing worse happened. They sat together in complete silence, with Tharan sometimes looking at Talward and either laughing or groaning. Talward did not react to either.

The dryer beeped when it was finished. “The dryer beeps when it’s finished,” Tharan said to Talward, as if he was speaking to a four year old child.

“I know that much,” Talward replied.

“Are your robes supposed to be pink?” Tharan asked, taking one of Talward’s formally white robes out of the dryer. 

“Pink? I don’t notice anything different about them,” Talward said, looking at them as hard as he could.

“Right. You see through Force magic, I keep forgetting. It doesn’t matter anyway. Pink’s a good color on you.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

After this incident, they immediately bought as many domestic programs for the ship droid as they could afford. It was money well spent, they both agreed.


End file.
